Bringing Music to Life

Introduction

Jam—Scat—Move—Groove

Get lively! Bring your music to life! Jam—Scat—Move—Groove!

That’s what this book is about—pouring yourself, body and soul, into your music making so that the music you make truly comes alive!

And while I’ll be talking mainly about music making, the same goes for other performing artists, too.

Performer, Performance and Audience

As a performer, you have a message to communicate to others, and you naturally want to communicate it as richly and vibrantly as possible. Perhaps you’re bringing to life some great work by Mozart or Brahms. It’s a privilege to act as the messenger of some of the greatest words, images or music the great masters of artistic history have ever produced. Or perhaps you are jamming, scatting, rocking, rolling, jiving—creating your own music with others, or solo, on the fly or according to the charts.

Music almost always starts from inspiration, and your ultimate goal is to convey that feeling through you as the performer to your audience. And it’s the same way for all performing artists, whether the message is to be communicated in music, dance, or words, whether you’re a musician playing the music of any style or period; a conductor, dancer, actor, or speaker; a business leader, spiritual teacher or minister; or a poet, entertainer, politician, or even a gymnast. Most people who perform in front of the public do so in order to communicate a message through their bodies and/or their voices so persuasively that their message will inspire and empower their audience. Whenever we experience great performances by the most amazing performers, it is their message which touches us, not just the communicator to whom we express our gratitude and appreciation. It is the message that has the power—and as musicians and artists, we are the ones who are called upon to deliver this inspirational word or experience. However, I have personally observed that every time we get up onstage, we have the ability to deliver the entire message—or to filter, inhibit or perhaps altogether fail to do so.

We have many wonderful performers who can deliver messages of inspiration, excitement or beauty in a way that quite transcends their personalities. Have you ever watched Elvis Presley perform (or jazz pianist Oscar Petersen, opera singer Renee Fleming, the Turtle Island String Quartet, conductor Leonard Bernstein, singer/ conductor Bobby McFerrin or the Kronos Quartet)—or seen the now-famous YouTube clips of the Venezuela Youth Orchestra under their sensational young conductor Gustavo Dudamel? It’s as though these great performers dissolve into the essence of the music they are making.

What do these super stars do that ordinary performers don’t?

They perform with such energy and intensity you can actually see the muscles in their body—and they give themselves heart and soul to the music!

It goes without saying that these great performers have mastered discipline, technique, intonation (being in tune) and musicianship. Those are certainly skills that every aspiring musician will need to learn, practice and carefully master—but they are not what this book is about. You can do everything this book will show you and it will be a total wash unless you bring integrity, sensitivity and scholarship to your performances.

In this book we explore the ways these great performers actually perform, watching their gestures and actions, then integrating what they do into a method of teaching, learning and expressing music so that it comes to life!

This book is about facilitating the magic—about channeling a thought, idea, experience or message through your art and yourself to the point where it transcends you. It’s about reassessing how we communicate and perform, and even how we learn the techniques that we use in our performance. It will take us places we may never have dreamed of, and teach us skills we might not imagine would be helpful, let alone integral and indeed, essential to our artistic training. And at the same time it may carry us back to a natural innocence we once had and show us how to bring it into our adult world.

My own artistic and personal life has been permanently and positively changed by my recognition of the ways in which we use our bodies to communicate the life in music. I don’t claim to be the first to discover this; I just claim to have been an honest observer.

Now let me talk to you on a more personal level—because these are matters which touch us all at the level of heart and soul. In my own journey, I’ve found that the great music moments happen when I am completely open about my feelings.

I want you to notice what happens when we are moved to tears by beauty or truth, when our breath is taken away, when we become speechless—when we reach the highest peaks of our experience or plunge most deeply into our soul, when we feel the most and show it, exposing our vulnerability to the fullest: we receive support rather than criticism, and love, not rejection.

The journey toward our innate and natural depth of feeling that I am proposing here isn’t about overcoming anxiety this time. I showed you how to deal with those issues by means of the Awareness, Commitment and Trust skills and exercises in The Inner Game of Music. In this book, the journey involves transforming our notions of what physical skills are central to preserving the spirit of an artistic message.

I can’t simply wave a wand and mutter a magic formula over you; there aren’t any shortcuts you can take to get where we’re going; and you may, in fact, feel as though I’m leading you by a very roundabout path on occasion. But I intend to offer you a very convincing presentation of three key elements which greatly influence our ability to communicate and inspire those we perform for.

You cannot force your music to have that magical touch of inspiration; it doesn’t work that way. But together we can create an environment that’s inviting and musical. There are no guarantees, but the tools, techniques and pathways I present here, accompanied by patience, discipline and integrity, are liable to alter the way you perform and listen to others—permanently.

I’ll give you a template to help you strengthen your inspiration and give new life to your performances.

From The Inner Game of Music via The Mastery of Music to Bringing Music to Life

I am a classically trained musician who has been playing the acoustic bass for more than forty years. I was Principal Bassist of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra for twenty-eight seasons, and my passion for music has also led me into writing books, teaching classes for musicians of all ages and genres, and performing and collaborating with artists in many, many different styles of music.

This is the third book in which I explore human elements outside the mainstream of classical music instruction.

My first book, with best-selling author Timothy Gallwey, applied Inner Game concentration techniques (which Tim first presented in The Inner Game of Tennis) to the making of music. The Inner Game of Music has sold over 250,000 copies worldwide, providing one of the primary means by which many musicians have overcome their mental obstacles to performance and learning. Like Tim’s other Inner Game books, it explores the three master skills of Awareness, Commitment and Trust—and by disconnecting musicians from those doubts and fears which inhibit their performance, reconnects them to their music.

The Inner Game has not lost any of its power, luster or effectiveness. Human nature is ever-present, anxious to seize your attention and distract your performance—and we will always need the Inner Game skills to overcome these distractions.

After many years of practicing and teaching the Inner Game, though, I discovered that there were elements of excellence that were not included in my Inner Game work. This understanding led me to write The Mastery of Music: Ten Pathways to True Artistry. Here I explored the human spirit in such varied expressions as courage, confidence, passion, communication, joy, tolerance, creativity, humility and inspiration, drawing on more than 120 interviews with world-class musicians. I learned that it’s not just what we play or how well we play the music, but more importantly, what special qualities we bring to our performance that give us our uniqueness.

The qualities named above that I explored in The Mastery of Music are central to the process by which each one of us develops our own unique voice.

In studying how great musical artists have mastered these human qualities I saw the great impact they can have on our own musicianship and life. Great artists constantly reinvent themselves and never stop growing, learning or reaching for excellence.

It was writing the final two chapters of The Mastery of Music on inspiration and creativity which led me into the terrain I am focusing on in this third book on the spirit and life in music—still on an endless journey born of my own curiosity toward the richest understanding of musical excellence and artistic fulfillment.

Comparing The Inner Game to Bringing Music to Life

In many ways, Bringing Music to Life is a lot like The Inner Game of Music. The Inner Game approach offers musicians a method for achieving optimum concentration and is primarily mental in its approach. It is based on three skills of concentration: Awareness, Commitment and Trust. Bringing Music to Life also presents a method, in this case, for communicating the sheer vitality, the life in music—but this time the techniques are applied to the body and soul of the performer. Both approaches can result in dramatically enhanced musical performances.

Bringing Music to Life also brings you three performance techniques, but these three have to do with body awareness rather than awareness of what the mind is up to. While The Inner Game of Music requires you to balance the three skills of Awareness, Commitment and Trust to achieve a state of relaxed concentration, Bringing Music to Life develops the three skills of Breath, Pulse and Movement, and integrates them in such a way as to bring life to music!

I wrote the Inner Game book after more than four years of research and testing Tim’s principles with individuals and groups at a variety of levels and in a wide range of musical styles. I have likewise field-tested the principles of Bringing Music to Life with artists in diverse fields of popular and classical music, with young and mature musicians, in schools, music education and performance. And just as the Inner Game approach was based on and inspired by the methodology of Tim Gallwey’s Inner Game of Tennis, the concepts developed in Bringing Music to Life have been largely based on and inspired by what I have seen of the method of renowned cellist, composer and educator, David Darling, of teaching free improvisation in his truly inspirational Music for People workshops.

Both books build on a cluster of natural principles which have been researched and codified so that they provide readers with a set of basic methods for approaching concentration and performance. Tim Gallwey’s Inner Game has its roots in Eastern philosophy, and David Darling’s Music for People is based on a return to the eager music making of childhood. His teaching method reflects accepted models of child pedagogy while it harkens back to indigenous folk cultures with their traditions of singing, dancing and drumming which have been with us as long as there have been human societies.

It all comes back to this: whether a piece of music has been composed or is being improvised in the moment, the composer or performer has felt the impulse to express something. The music may relate to a person, an occasion, some aspect of nature; it may tell a story, reflect a feeling such as love or beauty—or a passion for dance. Whatever this underlying thread of the work may be in any particular case, it is the performer’s fortunate task to capture this inspiration, internalize it, and then pass it along through music, drama, dance or words. And we have the power to inhibit or refresh our understanding and internalization of this message as we receive it or as we transmit it back out into the world through our own bodies.

The Structure of This Book

I have written this book in three parts, each part containing three chapters. Part I presents the basic concept of the book: that when we integrate the three skills of Breath, Pulse and Movement, the body naturally becomes a vehicle for the inspiration which alone can bring our music to life. Part II presents these three techniques of Breath (Voice), Pulse (Rhythm) and Movement (Body) in detail, with exercises and anecdotes from great performers. And Part III explores the magic that emerges when a performance comes to life.

Part I: The Methodology

In Part I, the first chapter is called Recapturing the Child and is about returning to that youthful spirit for life and music. Chapter 2 is A Recipe for Inspiration, and reveals a physical template for the expressive performing artist. I will tell you about the great jazz bassist Rufus Reid and the impact one of his performances had on me; about a conference I attended where a group of fiddlers played classical and Irish folk fiddle; and about my own personal journey studying free improvisation with David Darling. Chapter 3, Finding the Pathway, chronicles the five years of developing a methodology for bringing music to life. As a work in progress never ends, it is a pathway that led to many exciting discoveries concerning refining and articulating the illusive elements that allow music to become alive.

Part II: The Three Techniques

Part II presents the three techniques of Breath (Voice) [chapter 4], Pulse (Rhythm) [chapter 5] and Movement (Body) [chapter 6]. I offer many activities that we can do at our own pace and in our own way to develop and integrate these three body-based skills. You will hear many experts from the world of voice, rhythm and movement share their insights to better understanding of how we can embrace their disciplines and incorporate them into our own performances. I hope you will be overwhelmingly convinced that these three skills are so essential to the essence of bringing music to life that you will continue to develop them in your own way.

Part III: Inspiration

Part III is directly devoted to our ultimate goal: the world of inspiration. In The Complete Package (chapter 7) we visit five incredible examples of music when it is alive in classical, rock and Latin music. We can see the ultimate template of Breath, Pulse and Movement in the bodies of Joshua Bell, the Kronos Quartet, Tito Puente, Leonard Bernstein and Gustavo Dudamel. The proof is in the product. It is obvious by observing, emulating and being inspired by these lively musicians.

Being in the Moment—It’s You! (chapter 8) traces the inspiring stories of six of my colleagues who have found their own path to creating spontaneous moments that shimmer with musical life and spirit. Each of them has a unique voice and style, but they all strive for that improvisational moment where we find the magic in the music. Our final chapter, Chasing the Rainbow (chapter 9) explores the reasons artists dedicate their lives to pursuing the inspiration in music. What is the prize? Why do we do this? What are the feelings we are striving to have for ourselves and to share with others? And we learn that the joy is in the chase that inspires staying in the race and continuing to pursue the rainbow.

Although I recommend that you read this book from cover to cover, all three parts of this book stand alone and do not need to be read in sequence. If you are only interested in the techniques, then you can begin with Part II. If you like reading the books before going to the movies so you know the end result, then you can start with Part III! If you are a skeptic and need to be convinced of the premise and development of these concepts, then it will be important for you to begin with Part I! Otherwise, I believe there is a natural progression that flows from reading the book in sequence from Part I to the end.

Researching and Developing Bringing Music to Life

First, let’s talk about breath and voice. Breathing is a central discipline in yoga, meditation and tai chi, and each of these has added to my appreciation for breath as I learned a great deal about the voice from the celebrated author, composer and pianist W. A. Mathieu. I have also received brief but powerful individual coaching with voice teachers from both Eastern and Western styles of music, including Rhiannon, Silvia Nakkach, Lynn Miller, Kristin Korb and Douglas Webster.

I have learned about pulse and rhythm in depth while practicing and working with drummers and percussionists from a variety of world cultures, including Curt Moore, Kokomon Clottey and Masankho Kamsisi Banda, who was awarded the title of Unsung Hero of Compassion by the Dalai Lama—and have played jazz, improvisational, classical and world music with many Bay Area musicians.

And since so much of this book is about the body and movement, I have also taken introductory lessons in many types of movement discipline, from yoga and tai chi though jazz, hip-hop, nia, Eurythmics, Growth in Motion, energy work, Inter-Play, and even ballroom dancing. And for thirteen years, I have been developing movement sessions for musicians with Alan Scofield, the creative Bay Area dance teacher and choreographer from Young Imaginations.

In addition, I have done research and interviewed experts to supplement my own experiences. I attended David Darling’s Music for People improvisation workshops for several years, applying his principles to different styles of music. His methods are described in the book from Music for People Return to Child by Jim Oshinsky. In 2005 I was able to conduct an experimental course called Inspiration in Music for all styles of music and musicians. The faculty included myself and my colleagues David Darling, the tai chi master Chungliang Al Huang, vocalist Rhiannon, famed educator Mary Knysh and choreographer Alan Scofield. This workshop helped me formulate the theoretical beginnings of this approach to performance.

Since then, I have been able to test the concepts in Bringing Music to Life through demonstrations at music conventions, college residencies and in short workshops, and to observe for myself just how it can best be passed on in the classroom, in the studio and onstage.

I am grateful to my private bass students and teaching colleagues at our annual Golden Gate Bass Camp for allowing us to integrate voice, rhythm and movement into the mainstream of the bass curriculum, working and playing jazz and classical music with over a hundred musicians of all ages. Indeed, the unique curriculum we developed at our Golden Gate Bass Camp from 2004-2008, while it was inspired by David Darling’s free improvisation method, has proven successful when applied to many other styles of